Author S. E. Hinton never reveals the name of the school (nor the city in which the school is located, for that matter) that the Socs and greasers attend in her teen classic The Outsiders. The reader is told by Ponyboy that Cherry Valance "was a cheerleader at our school," but the name of the high school is never given in the novel. It can be assumed that it is the same one that Susan Hinton attended while she was growing up: Will Rogers High School in Tulsa, Oklahoma. She based The Outsiders on the actual rival gangs--the Socs and the Greasers--that often fought while she was a student there in the mid-1960s. She sympathized with the Greasers while she attended school, and eventually began work on her novel in 1965, telling it from the point of view the greaser, Ponyboy. Her other novels--Rumble Fish, Tex, That was Then, This is Now (which includes several characters from The Outsiders, including Ponyboy), and Taming the Star Runner--are presumably all set in the Tulsa area. Hinton later attended the University of Tulsa and still resides there.